The best Thai restaurant in Orange County? That’s always a tough question. The easiest answer is Bangkok Avenue in Huntington Beach.

But I also adore Huntington Beach’s Street Thai as well as Chada Thai and Thai Avenue in Garden Grove, each for different reasons. And there are others, here and there.

So here’s a better question: What are the 25 best Thai dishes in O.C.? And these are the answers, ranked:

25. Crying Tiger at Thai Nakorn

Thai Nakorn was once widely considered to be Orange County’s leading practitioner of Thai cuisine. There is one dish that this classic kitchen still makes better than anyone else: crying tiger, although they don’t actually call it that. The menu refers to it simply as “bbq beef.”

Whatever. This is the dish we have all come to know as crying tiger, which is grilled ribeye with a sour-spicy dipping sauce. Nakorn’s ribeye is always tender and, perhaps more importantly, always ultra-fatty, which creates a beautiful, unctuous char that gives this meat its distinctive Thai signature.

For Thai barbecue beef, this is still the place to beat. 12532 Garden Grove Blvd., Garden Grove, 714-583-8938, thainakornrestaurant.com

If there’s one dish that every Thai restaurant should be good at, it’s pad Thai. So why is this classic stir-fry so often the worst thing on the menu (read: excruciatingly sweet) at most Thai restaurants?

Anyone? The one kitchen that consistently gets it right is Suthathip in Anaheim Hills. Sweet, yes, but also salty, spicy, sour, crunchy, soft, squishy. Every intended flavor and contrasting texture comes together just right here.

Barely 20 people at a time can squeeze elbow-to-elbow into Sutha Thai’s tiny dining room. It’s important to note that the kitchen here has been consistently inconsistent over the years. One day the tom yum might be excellent, yet the very next day it’s off.

The one dish that seems immune to the kitchen’s wild mood swings is the appetizer listed as “pandan leave” in which nuggets of dark meat chicken are marinated in sweet soy, wrapped in pandan leaves and then grilled. The meat absorbs an almost vanilla-like scent from the palm-like leaves of a Southeast Asian screw pine tree.

1161 Irvine Blvd., Tustin, 714-734-6100.

On the menu at Sutha in Tustin: Thai-style chicken thigh wrapped in pandan leaves. (Photo by Brad A. Johnson, Orange County Register/SCNG)

22. Beef jerky at Chada Thai

Most Thai restaurants serve a version of beef jerky, and most of it tastes like shoe leather. If you want to know how it’s meant to taste, order it at Chada Thai.

Put it in your mouth, and a wave of dark soy — simultaneously salty and sweet — rushes across your tongue. It is chewy, for sure. But it is inherently chewable and always enjoyable.

Although its origins are Chinese, duck noodle soup is inextricable from everyday life in Bangkok. Huntington Beach’s new Street Thai serves the area’s best Bangkok-Chinatown-style duck noodle soup. Steam billows from the bowl, scenting the air with cinnamon and star anise.

What makes this soup more Thai than Chinese is the addition of fresh Thai chilies, which offsets the sweetness of palm sugar. Fun fact: This is where the staff of Bangkok Avenue go for duck soup when they are off duty because their own restaurant doesn’t serve it.

Just about every Thai restaurant serves a variation of salad with spicy lime dressing, topped either with beef or shrimp. No other kitchen does it better than Street Thai’s phla goong, which is a beautiful composition of lettuce, lemongrass, chilies, onion, mint and shrimp. The shrimp are marinated almost like ceviche in a bath of lime juice and chili paste, although they might be lightly cooked as well. This is as classic as it gets.

Shrimp salad known as phla goong, served at Street Thai in Huntington Beach. (Photo by Brad A. Johnson, Orange County Register/SCNG)

18. Pork belly pad kra prao at Chada Thai

Krapow. Gra pao. Kra prao. No matter how it gets translated it into English, every Thai restaurant serves a version of this stir-fry involving fresh green chilies, basil and meat. Chada Thai taps into the pork belly trend and makes a variation with big, fat, crispy, deep-fried cubes of bacon. Don’t be a wimp on the spice level with this one. You’ll need the acidic heat of chilies to counteract the outrageous richness of the pork belly.

A popular street food in Thailand, moo ping is marinated pork skewers. The bite-sized pieces of pork shoulder are marinated in honey, which caramelizes into a heavenly char on the grill. (That barbecue scent that fills the parking lot at night? This is where it’s coming from.) 19690 Beach Blvd., Huntington Beach, 714-964-1151, gosilkthai.com

In April, new owners took control of Hot & Spicy Thai. They have revamped the dining room with gorgeous photos of Thailand and they have completely overhauled the menu with their own family’s recipes. This is now my favorite place to go for panang curry, aggressively flavored with kaffir lime leaf and red chili paste. 16561 Bolsa Chica St., Huntington Beach, 714-840-5404

Unofficially, the name of this restaurant is E-San Rod-Sap, but you won’t see those words anywhere here — not on the signage painted on the door, nor on the menu, or even on the restaurant’s health permit.

The name to look for is simply Thai and Laos Market, which is the name they’ve officially registered with the health department. I won’t lie: From the outside, it looks sketchy. But the restaurant is spotlessly clean.

The kitchen’s allegiance straddles the Thai/Laos border, and their Thai cooking is serious. When they cook pad see ew, they let it shrivel in the wok beyond that point where lesser cooks might be afraid of letting it burn. The result is a deeper, richer flavor than anyone else’s stir-fried soy-sauce noodles.

1721 W. La Palma Ave., Anaheim, 714-535-2656

Pad see ew at Thai and Laos Market in Anaheim. (Photo by Brad A. Johnson, Orange County Register/SCNG)

14. Pork larb at Chada Thai

Although considered the national dish of Laos, the ground meat salad known as larb is equally popular in Thailand, especially in the north. In American Thai restaurants, larb is almost as popular as pad Thai or pad see ew.

If I have to pick a favorite larb from many strong contenders, I’ll tilt the scales in favor of Chada’s pork salad. The ground meat is stir-fried with a generous handful of rice powder, then tossed with scallions, dried chilies, fresh chilies, red onion, mint and cilantro.

If you’ve ever wondered why larb is always served with sliced raw cabbage it’s because the cabbage is meant to have a cooling effect on your mouth when your mouth is on fire. Never ask for this dish to be served mild. That would miss the point entirely.

The river prawn by itself is incredible. The pad Thai by itself is very good, too. But put these two things together at Thai Avenue, and you have one of the finest pad Thais you’ll ever eat.

The trick to ordering this dish is to make sure to clarify that you want it with a large river prawn, not the standard shrimp. The prawn is gorgeous and succulent, cooked to perfection in its shell and served with a unique house-made salsa that involves lime juice, fish sauce and green Thai chilies.

This salsa is key because the success of any pad Thai depends on that balance of sweet/sour/spicy/salty. Take this salsa and pour it over the prawn, then ply the prawn from its shell and fold it into the noodles. Or douse the salsa directly on the noodles and eat the prawn separately. Either way, it is extraordinarily delicious — and beautifully unique.

When Thai chefs cook pad kra pow for non-Thai people, they usually slice the meat into strips, like typical stir-fry meat.

But when Thais cook kra pow for themselves, they chop or pulverize the meat into bits, as if making larb. They stir-fry the ground meat with Thai basil and birds-eye chilies. They don’t use western bell peppers. They don’t use jalapeños. You’ll know if it’s done right when the top of your head tingles — and the kra pow here feels like electroshock therapy.

Get it with a lacy, flash-fried egg on top, just like your Thai grandmother would do.

Beef pad kra pow with a fried egg served over rice at Thai and Laos Market in Anaheim. (Photo by Brad A. Johnson, Orange County Register/SCNG)

11. Rad na at Street Thai

The rad na at Street Thai is unlike the rad na everywhere else. Rad na is a ubiquitous dish made with wide rice noodles, Chinese kale and a somewhat colorless, sort of slimy Thai gravy.

In a unique twist, the chef here takes the rice noodles and forms them into patties, which he fries until crisp and slightly burnt around the edges but still squishy and slippery under the surface. This creates an exciting contrast of textures and a much deeper layering of flavors, something that I’ve always found missing from rad na elsewhere.

“Add some pickled [green] chilies,” the owner says. “It makes it even better.”

The quickest way to ruin a batch of tom kha kai (kai is sometimes spelled gai) is to put too much coconut milk in it. The popular chicken/galangal/coconut soup should be white, but it shouldn’t taste like coconut sunscreen lotion, which is often what happens when timid diners ask for their soup to be served mild.

It should taste sour and hot. The sour comes from lemongrass and galangal. The hot comes from fire but also fresh chilies. The soup should reach, at the very least, a gentle boil immediately before you slurp it. You won’t find a better tom kha kai than this. Period.

If you’ve never eaten pork neck, let this be your epiphany. The meat is marinated in palm sugar and fish sauce (don’t worry, it doesn’t taste like fish) and grilled until it turns black around the edges. It’s got tongue-like texture. And it is absolutely fantastic, especially when dipped into a slurry of lime juice and chili flakes.

It’s sort of like larb, but instead of being made with stir-fried ground meat, it’s made with crumbled fermented sausage, or nam, plus peanuts and raw ginger. The nam at Thai and Laos Market might be slightly more sour than the nam served in most other restaurants. To some it’s an acquired taste. It’s also very addictive.

Nam and crispy rice salad at Thai and Laos Market in Anaheim. (Photo by Brad A. Johnson, Orange County Register/SCNG)

6. Chu-chee prawns at Bangkok Avenue

This is hands-down the best curry in Orange County. And it’s not a soup. The chu-chee curry (sometimes spelled choo chee) is really just a gravy. It is a thick, fragrant sauce that perfumes the air with coconut milk, chili paste and kaffir lime. It is especially delicious when slathered over giant river prawns. Sometimes these prawns can be as big as lobsters, so you might get two, or you might get only one.

You think you know tom yum koong? Think again. Come here and try this restaurant’s version of Thailand’s most famous soup (sometimes spelled tom yum goong). It will blow your mind. The shrimp in this hot and sour soup are not your typical shrimp. They are big, fat, monstrous creatures with their heads and shells intact, split down the middle to make them easy to peel and eat. As they gently boil, that goopy stuff from their carcasses comes loose and dissolves into the broth, adding a distinctive creaminess and umami that pushes this tom yum over the top. It is seriously incredible. Trust me on this one, please.

Looking for something new? Most places stick with a well-worn script, but the chef’s salad here is a glorious ad lib. It is an absolutely brilliant chopped salad made with ground chicken, sauteed shrimp, toasted coconut, spinach leaves and crisp green beans straight from the farmer’s market. The dressing is a sweet/sour blend of tamarind, palm sugar, lime juice, red chili paste and coconut milk. It’s not just a good Thai salad. It’s one of my favorite salads of all time.

The menu offers three different regional styles of Thai sausage. Order the sampler of all three. The deeply dark red-orange one is sai oua, a Chiang Mai-style sausage made with chicken and shrimp, plus kaffir lime and a generous amount of red chili paste. The other two hail from Thailand’s northeastern Isan region. One of those, called naem (or nam), is a fermented pork sausage made with sticky rice, salt and garlic. Because of the fermentation, this one is really quite sour, which catches people off-guard if they don’t know what they’re getting into. The third one is a classic Isan-style pork sausage riddled with green chilies. Be careful with this one. Keep an eye out for the peppers. If see a piece of chili larger than, say, a pea… pull the fire alarm!

Sampler of three styles of Thai sausage at Bangkok Avenue in Huntington Beach. (Photo by Brad A. Johnson, Orange County Register/SCNG)

2. Fish cakes at Chada Thai

Nothing I’ve eaten in California reminds me more of eating in Thailand than the fish cakes at Chada Thai. If you’ve tasted a fish cake at any other Thai restaurant locally, there’s a high likelihood that what you ate came from a frozen food distributor. Not these. They are made in-house daily, exactly the way they do it in the motherland. It’s time-consuming and tedious. And there’s nothing else like it.

I don’t know why green mango salads aren’t more popular than green papaya salads. It’s like Coke versus Pepsi, and Pepsi is papaya. The two salads are more or less the same recipe but with crunchy underripe mangos standing in for underripe papayas. The mango salad at Bangkok Avenue is as perfect — and as refreshing — as it gets. This is the epitome of Thai cuisine.

James Beard Award-winning restaurant critic Brad A. Johnson has been writing about food for more than 20 years. A prolific traveler who has dined around the world, he joined the Orange County Register in 2012 to help readers find the best steaks, the strongest margaritas, the freshest sushi, the hottest Thai curries and more. Brad dines incognito and pulls no punches. Although he has yet to find a local restaurant to merit a perfect four-star rating, he remains ever hopeful as the quest continues.